by Daniel Hathaway
HAPPENING TODAY:
Nothing’s happening today in the classical music calendar, but look ahead here and plan your next two weeks.
NEWS BRIEFS:
British journalist Norman Lebrecht wrote in yesterday’s Slipped Disc that “Mark Jackobs of the Cleveland Orchestra has responded in dignified fashion to his peremptory dismissal by the turbulent Cleveland Institute of Music.” (Pictured: Jackobs & CIM viola studio.) Read the story here.
TODAY’S ALMANAC:
An interesting collection of milestones, first performances, & happenings to note on the eighteenth day of March.
In 1848, the premiere of William Henry Fry’s Leonora in Philadelphia marked the first known performance of a grand opera by an American composer. In a review of the 1987 revival of the piece by New York’s Bel Canto Opera, New York Times critic Bernard Holland wrote,
Fry’s music has its clumsy accompaniments at times, but it is solidly made and put on stage with a firm dramatic sense. Leonora’s love scene with her base-born lover Julio in Act II works well as theater and the big ensemble near the end of Act II builds to a considerable power. The extended duet in which the noble Montalvo persuades Julio to disguise himself as royalty enjoys a similarly hearty momentum.
On this date in 1902, Arnold Schoenberg’s string sextet Verklärte Nacht debuted in Vienna. Based on Richard Dehmel‘s poem of the same name, the piece — cast in the highly chromatic tonal idiom that preceded Schoenberg’s adoption of twelve-tone technique — has been described as the composer’s earliest important work. (Later arrangements include Schoenberg’s own for string orchestra, and a version by Eduard Steuermann for piano trio.) Click here to watch the video of a performance by ENCORE Chamber Music players Jinjoo Cho and Nancy Zhou, violins, Ettore Causa and Dimitri Murrath, violas, and Amit Even-Tov and Mindy Park, cello, in CIM’s Mixon Hall on July 29, 2017.
And on March 18, 1905, American pianist, teacher, and Charles Ives cataloger and editor and teacher John Kirkpatrick was born in New York City. He specialized in the music of Ives, devoting nearly a decade to studying the complexities of the Concord Sonata with the composer, who painted portraits of New England transcendentalists Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Bronson and Louisa May Alcott, and Henry David Thoreau into the work. Kirkpatrick gave the first complete performance in 1939, marking a turning point in the public recognition of the insurance executive turned avant-garde composer. Click here to listen to Kirkpatrick’s 1948 recording.
And remember the famous art heist at Boston’s Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum on this date in 1990? In the largest such theft in US history, a dozen paintings, worth ca. $500 million were removed overnight from the Italianate palace built by the eccentric Gardner, a looting that has never been solved.
Gardner planned to open her museum on New Year’s Day, 1903 with a private performance by the Boston Symphony. One of many amusing anecdotes about her arts patronage had to do with her desire to test the acoustic of her music room without giving its architectural details away before the grand opening. Solution: she arranged for a hundred students of the Perkins School for the Blind to enjoy a free concert there.
